Assessing Practices for Using Indicators in Fields Related to Youth

The European Commission’s 2009 communication 'An EU Strategy for Youth - Investing and Empowering: a renewed open method of coordination to address youth challenges and opportunities' invites both the Member States and the Commission to cooperate in the youth field by means of a renewed 'open method of coordination'. It proposes a cross-sectoral approach, which involve all key policy areas that affect Europe's young people and encourages a more research and evidence-based youth policy. To this end, the European Commission ensures that a range of data and statistics on young people is available and accessible, through, for example, a number of reports (published in 2009), including: Youth in Europe - A Statistical Portrait; EU Youth Report; and European Research on Youth. As part of the new EU Youth Strategy (2010-2018), the Commission has also set up an expert group on youth indicators, which has been given two tasks: - to propose a dashboard of indicators in the areas of education, employment, social inclusion and health; and - to provide an overview of possible new indicators in 'core' youth policy areas where they do not yet exist. In parallel, Ecorys was commissioned by the European Commission, Directorate General Education and Culture (DG EAC), to carry out an assessment on how Member States are currently applying indicators at the national level in areas related to youth. The general objective of the study was to provide inputs, based on experiences from and practices in the Member States, to the design of a system of using indicators that will support the Commission in developing youth policy guided by knowledge and evidence.